Businesses are deriving tremendous financial benefits from using the internet to strengthen relationships and improve connectivity with customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. Progressive organizations are integrating critical information systems including customer service, financial, distribution, and procurement from their private networks with the Internet. The business benefits are significant, but not without risk. Unfortunately, the risks are growing.
In response to the growing business risks of attacks, potentials for legal suits, federal compliance requirements, and so forth, companies have spent millions to protect the digital assets supporting their critical information systems. In particular, many companies have recognized that the first security barrier to their business's information systems is their access control system.
Access control pertains to an infrastructure that is directed towards enforcing access rights for network resources. Access control may grant or deny permission to a given device user, device or node, for accessing a resource and may protect resources by limiting access to only authenticated and authorized users and/or devices.
Most of today's switches have an IEEE 802.1X port authenticator built in to the switch. This allows for 802.1X authentication on any of its ports, but it also has the requirement that every client has to support the 802.1X protocol. However, for clients that do not support the 802.1X protocol, they cannot gain access to any of the resources provided by the switch. Therefore, it is with respect this and other considerations, that the present invention has been made.